Yes siree, the excitement never stops!
When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.
Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.
You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!
Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.
For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.
And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?
Nooooo!
No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!
But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.
He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.
I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.
And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.
I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.
Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?
I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.
Now I must find this sequel.
Yeah this is because (if we limit the scope to multiplayer games), the gaming world is sooooooo used to basically minor niche hit or mediocre games that are not actually that fun and engaging that when an /actual/ hit comes along, everyone’s brain explodes.
A decade or two ago you would actually fairly commonly have multiplayer games that were actually hits, actually had broad appeal, that had actual continuous sustained growth from actual organic recommendations.
That hasn’t happened in such a long time that its now practically inconceivable.
In the last roughly 5 years, barring an occasional indie hit with actual staying power, Multiplayer games have been so lackluster, flawed, exploitative or all of those combined for so long, promoted by giant marketing campaigns and hype machines, that everyone has just gotten used to new game come out, its not that great, but NEXT GAME SOON!!!, buy, rinse, repeat.
An actually good multiplayer game with wide, broad appeal is now so nearly totally unimaginable to the basically intelligencia and managers and CEOs of the video game world that the very language of describing video game popularity has morphed to accommodate the expectation of expensive mediocre garbage that is thrown away when the next flashy bauble comes along.
Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:
This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.
Time travel!
So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.
Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.
Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:
Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.
even moooore possible endings
No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.
As a person who used to work at MSFT:
I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.
They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.
The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.
Itll probably take half a decade.
…
For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.
Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.
I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.
We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.
Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.
Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.
The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.
Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.
This isn’t an insult, its a fact.
When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.
Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.
I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.
Why latch on to Trump in particular?
Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.
Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.
You know, standard fascist shit?
It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.
MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.
Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.
The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.
Absolutely amazing.
My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.
Its insane when you compare the things they hold dear and are most concerned about to themselves personally and the people they support.
They will tell you they are highly worried about secret sex trafficking and millions of missing children, but extremely often they and the people they support are sexually abusing children, or have a history of it.
Its the cognitive dissonance thats the insane part, the extreme hypocrisy.
Gaetz is almost certainly a person who knowingly paid an underage girl for sex. The person who facilitated it basically already plead guilty and may be cooperating with investigators, though the proceedings of this seem to be going quite slowly.
This is even more insane given that Gaetz is one of the most Q-Anony of the lunatic Republicans in Congress. Kind of their whole thing is largely based around saving children from being sex trafficked.
What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.
Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.
'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.
Bleck.
It isnt so much vaporware as basically massively bad funding model and development practices.
They have software. There is a ‘game’ you can ‘play’.
Its just that its still buggy as fuck and the gameplay doesnt really meaningfully work.
Its… more like an alpha that never stops adding features and content… and as a result, never does a feature lock and actually make what they have into a non buggy, actually compelling game.
Fine.
I’ll settle for it.
Still, stiiiill mad that the planned TV series for Trent Reznor’s Year Zero universe never happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.
Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.
They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.
Oh yeah, I watched the whole series at one point around 5 years ago. I could do with a refresh, love Adam Curtis!
Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but
Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.
I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.
They had to wait for the worlds first quadruple A game to definitively flop before they confirmed Sea of Thieves.
I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.
But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?
Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.
Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?
Nah. Verbotten opinions.
I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.
The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’
But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.
Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.